


can't play dead

by arbitrarily



Category: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-02-28 09:56:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2728016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is more than one way to reset a life: Rita Vrataski after the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	can't play dead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fearlessfan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fearlessfan/gifts).



> Happy Holidays and Happy Yuletide! I had so much fun with the prompts you left me and this fic was a joy to write. I hope you have a wonderful holiday as well as a Happy New Year!

 

 

**one.**

 

She hears his footsteps first. A soldier crosses the firing range dressed in an officer’s uniform. A major, she determines, as he approaches closer. She’s sweaty, brushes idly at her neck, inhales as she rises.

“Yes? What do you want?”

The Major laughs.

“I’d say we’ve got some celebrating to do,” he says to her.

Rita’s face tightens; she looks him up and down. His grin widens that much more. What she first assumed was him playing at cocky she recognizes as something far more personal.

“Who are you?”

 This is not the first time they have met.

 

 

 

Rita wakes in a hotel room. A sharp breath in as she blinks her eyes open, a quick kick of her feet to push the plush comforter to the floor. The room is mostly dark, ambient street light making its way into the room via a crack in the drawn curtains. Brussels. No, Belfast. No, wait: Budapest. She presses her face into the pillow and breathes in deep. One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four. One Two Three Four. When she rolls, opens her eyes again, the room is still dark, but she has adjusted. She is still adjusting. She is a work-in-progress of adjustment. Rita groans and struggles to sit up. She runs her fingers over the scar that cuts across her forehead, catches herself, stops.

She gets out of bed. Her watch reads a little after 0400 hours. She cracks her neck, the sound brutal. She tries to do it again but the muscle resists. Lately, she finds with each passing day her body resists her more and more. She doesn’t train the way she used to, back when there was a reason for it. Back when there was, impossibly, the time for it. She’s busier now in peace than when they were at war. Who’d have thought, huh?

Rita swings one legs forward and then the other. She bends and snaps her ankles, makes crude, quick circles. She drops to the floor and balances her weight on her hands. She does not turn on the light. She stretches into the dark and waits for the sun to rise.

 

 

 

This is how the war ends:

No one knows. It’s a secret, a mystery too impossible to understand. There is war one day and then there isn’t.

She is told both stories of the war’s end by the same man: Major William Cage. The first time he tells her he gives her the same party line delivered by the General: an unexpected explosion at the Louvre. The second time he tells her the truth. The impossible truth. That she was there, that they were there together, that they’re the thing that no one knows.

This is how you win a war: she does not get to remember any of it at all.

 

 

 

Cage takes her to a pub the day she meets him. News of the defeat of the Omega and the end of the war has spread quickly. The pub is rowdy, all soldiers spilling over from base, whooping calls of victory while beer sloshes over the sides of mugs to splash their uniforms.

Rita and Cage sit at a tall table, as removed as possible from the surrounding melee.

“I’ve seen you on the TV,” she says, looking up at him. She tries to keep her face blank, the way she imagines a good interrogator might approach a suspected party. The only thing she gets from him though is familiar amusement, like she’s tried this before, she’s tried this enough times before for it be old hat for him. She hates that.

“I’ve spoken of you on the TV,” he says.

Rita crosses her arms over her chest, cradling every small, petty frustration she harbors. “Was it you who came up with all that Angel of Verdun bullshit?” What little she knows of him is this: he spent the majority of the war as a propaganda mouthpiece and that he won the war in secret. Neither of those things contribute much towards friendship and respect.

He chuckles to himself. “That came to me fully packaged and ready-made.” He holds his hands open, as if to say _what can you do?_ “I had nothing to do with the nicknames – on my honor.”

His honor’s not worth two shits to her. It must show, because his eyes crinkle that much more. He smiles without showing teeth, like even she herself is an inside joke he keeps to himself.

“You’re gonna have to grant me a handicap here,” she finally says to him. She wonders if they’ve ever been to this pub before. She doubts it; she can’t imagine they’d have ever found the time for it. She likes the idea of that – that this is something new. That he doesn’t have a private cheat sheet stashed away telling him all that is to happen between them. It’s equal footing. She drinks hungrily from her pint, foam clinging to her bottom lip that she wipes away quickly with the side of her hand.

“I’m sorry?”

“Not to go and mix my metaphors, but you’re playing with a stacked deck. I just met you. But you – you claim – ” She stops abruptly. She can’t even say aloud those simple words _you know me_. She has to temper it with words like _claim_. Their eyes meet.

“Tell me what happened,” she says. “Tell me everything that happened.”

His smile now is soft and kind, and if it wasn’t for the edge that still haunts his eyes she’d call him a liar. He looks at her not only like he wants her to trust him but that he expects her to – that he has already earned that trust. That he earned it a long time ago.

He tells her everything that happened.

 

 

 

This is what Cage does not tell her: it never ceases to surprise him how her incredulity vanishes so easily. Each time, every time. She takes him at his word. Maybe the story is that outlandish and that incredible that it could only ever be the truth. Maybe it’s because she lived it, too. Maybe, a small and impractical part of him hopes, there is memory there. Somewhere, deep and buried inside of her, she remembers him. Maybe it’s possible to be aware, on some unrecognized cellular level, of all the lives that have been lived and forgotten.

If he had told her this, this is what Rita would have said: It’s not possible. I remember nothing. No one remembers anything. It’s only you.

She would say: memory is the loneliest responsibility you can be assigned. Only you will remember. Only you.

It’s always only you.

But they do not have that conversation.

He tells her everything but this, and at the end he looks to her with the same earnestness that would have accompanied the conversation they never had.

“You think – you think I still got it? That I can still ... ” Cage does not have a word he wants to use, so he just moves his hand, a quick looping gesture.

Rita shrugs, takes a small sip of her beer. “I wouldn’t know,” she says. “Without the Omega, I’d assume ... ” She trails off and a makes a gesture of her own, a quick chop towards her neck. _Dead as a doornail_. She takes another larger sip. “I wouldn’t go walking into any traffic though, I was you.” Her mouth quirks up into a tight smile and his own blooms into something bigger, contagious, as her own spreads.

“Very funny.”

Her lips press together but she’s still smiling. “I am entirely serious about the jaywalking, Major.”

“Cage,” he corrects, quickly. If there’s a small hurt there, she has no desire to detect it. “William, Bill, Cage. Not Major.”

Rita nods once.

“Okay then, Cage William Bill Cage.”

 

 

 

The private crossing the compound looks old, too old for a private. But then, Christ knows where they’ve been rounding up the recruits as of late. Miscreants pulled from the drunk tank, draft dodgers, sudden converts who found a come-to-Jesus moment here in their 25th hour and picked up a rifle.

The private may be old, but he’s still a skittish thing, nervous as he steps closer towards her. He’s wary as he eyes a mechanical Mimic, stumbling when it moves towards him, somehow timid despite the brashness required to even approach her.

Rita raises from the ground and stands tall.

“Yes? What do you want?”

 

 

 

The United Defense Force Victory Tour is mounted within a month after the war’s end.

The tour is designed to inspire the rebuilding process, help everyone (the everyone who remains, which is more of an anyone than an everyone) move forward, raise funds. Rita still reigns supreme as the Angel of Verdun and Cage is still the military’s most photogenic press man; she shouldn’t be as surprised as she is when the both of them are asked to headline the tour.

The tour’s comprised of a lot of speeches, a lot of meetings with dignitaries, and they are the only two who know the truth of what happened. Most of the speeches, delivered by Cage, by the General, by prime ministers and presidents and chancellors but never her, talk about starting fresh. That this is a chance at a new beginning. It is, but what they don’t say is that you inherit the old with you. A blank slate implies something must be erased, something was there to begin with.

Rita hates every minute of it.

 

 

 

The first stop of the tour is Hamburg. A memorial has already been built where the first meteor hit. They arrive early that morning, time to kill before the televised meet-and-greet with the German chancellor out at the memorial. The statue they’ve erected is a wrought-iron monstrosity meant to resemble a Mimic – arms curling up and out towards the sky. Rita supposes that from a certain angle and a complete absence of memory of the last six years it could almost resemble a tree.

“Hope reaches from here.” That’s the line that accompanies the statue and the line the German chancellor will pronounce at the podium erected amidst all that pocked and torn landscape.

Rita sits down with Cage at a small cafe, the both of them clad in their dress blues, both with cups of coffee and time before the ceremony.

Cage lays out three packets of sugar on the table between them, neat in a row. He taps the third before reclining back in his chair.

She stares at the sugar before gathering all three packets up, ripping them open at once. She dumps them into her coffee.

“How many?” she asks.

Cage shifts in his chair. “Beg pardon?”

“Sugars. How many do you take.” There is no inflection to her voice, no uptick at the end of the sentence to mark it as a question.

He smiles to himself, his head bowed. “None,” he says looking up at her.

Rita stirs her coffee but she watches him. He chuckles to himself before leaning forward, his elbows braced against the side of the table.

“You know, it was easier to prove myself to you when there were still Mimics around to kill.”

She takes a small sip of her coffee, sighs at the heat of it. “Yes,” she says, “slaughter truly is the key to my heart, Major.”

“Cage.”

“Cage.” She says his name as a four-letter word, and behind the lip of her cup of coffee she finds she can’t help it: her lips quirk up in the smallest and tightest of smiles.

 

 

 

Her shoulders ache but her arms don’t tremble. The pain is good, she thinks. Familiar.

A private approaches her, posture straight and marked with purpose. She frowns, pushes the sweat out of her eyes as she stands, anger right there, always right there, just beneath her skin and ready for her to grasp.

“Yes?”

 _This_ guy, doesn’t even blink.

“What do you want?”

 

 

 

So they travel the world.

Rita – not the Rita she knows, but the Rita Vrataski marketed to the masses – continues to ascend.

On the sides of buses, on the sides of buildings, in a pack of commemorative trading cards, as an Oscar-bait female lead in a biopic opening that fall, as the cleavage-baring far-less prestigious action babe in the faux-biopic action film opening that February (“SAVIOR. WARRIOR. FULL. METAL. BITCH.” reads the tagline), in tap shoes on Broadway ( _oh, how they fret, they fear the fight / they say that time’s a loaded gun / but they had yet to meeeeeeeeeeet / the Angel of Verdun!_ ), in the Museum of London via the propeller blade she wielded on the battlefield – everywhere.

This is how you live forever. They take you as their own and you live on and on. For them, you will never die.

♫ _They had yet to meet the Angel of Verdun!_ ♫

  

 

 

 

**two.**

 

Rita woke outside Verdun.

A hand slapped against the metal frame above her bottom bunk.

“Alright, fellas, light ‘em up,” a voice rang out in the barracks. “We got some celebrating to do.”

She died there, too.

The first time Rita died, when she ingested the Alpha’s blood – blue blood that turned black as it first met and then coated her skin, sticky like tar – she didn’t fight it. She didn’t give in, but she also didn’t fight. The dirtiest secret she has ever kept is that death had seemed to her a relief. She was tired, so tired; she had recently become the most fatal sort of tired, the kind without hope. So she closed her eyes and the Alpha’s blood stank and it burned so she screamed and she cried and then –

A hand slapped against the metal frame above her bottom bunk.

Her body jerked. She woke again.

 

 

 

The Rita Vrataski who died the first time was not the same Rita who died a second or a third or a three-hundredth time.

Day One of the reset, she had thought of it initially as a gift, a chance to do better, fight harder. So she did. She would do anything and everything but lay there waiting in the mud.

A feeling of deja vu haunted her the course of that first day. Doubt curdled into terror in her. It was like she was a fucking prophet. She had seen this all before. She knew they all would die, she had seen the ruin that awaited them. No, she thought, as the Jackets were mounted on them and the battlefield grew nearer – she had lived it.

She thought of it as a gift until she didn’t. She died again that day, this time in a different stretch of mud and dirt, barbed wire wrapped tight around her ankle but she didn’t even notice it, didn’t feel it. It was all the same, except for how it was different. She was different. She took in a wheezing breath, traced the footsteps that had led to _this_ , coughed and hacked blood, pressed her forehead to the earth. This was meant to be a gift this –

“Alright, fellas, light ‘em up. We got some celebrating to do.”

She woke again. She promised she’d do better this time.

 

 

 

She taught herself to fight. She learned to fight better. She calibrated herself into equal parts weapon and machine. She was evolving, and she knew: the Mimics were evolving, too. She went to the General and wound up on an operating table, woke in the bottom bunk in the barracks screaming. Tried again, sought death in a psych ward and found it. Woke again. “Alright, fellas – ” Jerked awake, grabbed for limbs no longer missing. Woke to the phantom ache of clean knuckles that should be bruised and bloody, a body unmarked by the abuse she had treated it to, that caused her to reset, to wake. She found two allies: Dr. Carter and Hendricks. Dr. Carter believed her each time she sought him out; Hendricks provided a 50/50 ratio. The times he didn’t believe her, when he looked at her with that worried compassion hurt in a way she didn’t know what to do with. It hurt in a way that did not disappear when she woke up.

“I’m listening, I just – what you’re saying – ”

“Don’t worry about it,” Rita said. Arguing yielded only more concern. She’d tried that tactic seventeen times already; she had told him not to worry twenty-three times. “I’m very tired, is all.”

And then Hendricks died. But, then, so did she.

 

 

 

This is how you win a war:

You die. First, you have to die.

 

 

 

This might be the time, she thought, when she got it right. Her hands didn’t shake when she reloaded the cartridge but blood was flowing freely from a deep gash along her elbow. She ignored it. If this was going to be the time then she could worry about the blood and the elbow later. Later. If she lived, there would be a later, a tomorrow. They could move forward, so she moved forward, across the field, and someone screamed, “Mine!” and then she might have screamed too as the ground burst up beneath her and then –

“Alright, fellas, light ‘em up. We got some celebrating to do.”

She woke up.

One. Two. Three. Four. She breathed. She counted each breath.

Hendricks wouldn’t remember: he taught her this.

 

 

 

Day 127 of the reset Hendricks taught her to meditate. “It’s easy,” he said, which made her think it couldn’t be that effective. Anything worth doing took effort. She couldn’t think of one thing that disputed that rule. She told him this.

“Love,” he said, pointing a finger at her.

“Marriage,” she parried, pointing a finger back.

He grinned then, all straight white teeth, so she grinned too, and then his face fell patient and serious.

“Meditation,” he began.

You started with focusing on your breath. The inhale through the nose, the feeling as it passed down your throat and filled your lungs, its exit. You focused on your body next. Your eyes closed, your hands heavy and limp in your lap. You felt the floor beneath you. You felt the earth. If you were good enough at this, you felt your place. You felt a part of something greater than yourself.

Rita pictured the Jacket mounted on her as she trudged through the fields, again and again and again. How that made her a part of something greater than herself.

You empty your mind, he told her.

When she did this, all she could see was gray. She saw gray and it was as if the picture pulled back to expand the focus. The gray wasn’t constant, but a part of something greater. It was a sky, it was London, it was home, inhale, exhale, focus on the gray.

“If it helps,” he told her, “count each breath.”

So she did. One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four.

 

 

 

Hendricks died each time. She watched him die three hundred times.

Some things you can’t change. That was a rule, she supposed, but it was one she refused to accept. There was a way to win the battle at Verdun and there was a way to keep Hendricks alive, she was sure of it.

Day 212: she kept him alive. She saved him only for her to die. She looked straight at him before the high-pitched whining in the sky overwhelmed her. He’s alive, she had thought, he’s alive –

“Alright, fellas, light ‘em up. We got some celebrating to do.”

It was like trying to juggle a handful of live grenades. Kill the Mimics, win Verdun, save Hendricks, stay alive. You got three right and the fourth failed.

You focused on the wrong part of the mission and the whole thing failed.

Rita became spoiled by it, in a way. Each death was a kind of misery to be endured, but there was always that bright promise attached to it – she could die too and then he would come back. If she died, then his death would not stick. If she died, they both could come back together. They could try again.

Dr. Carter was the one to burst her bubble. “You keep trying, and them? The Mimics? They keep learning. They’re learning you, which means,” he paused, “they’re learning us.”

The final time she fought at Verdun she did not know it was the final time. She killed one hundred Mimics (this number would come to be a lie offered by Major William Cage himself – he’d be off by a statistical margin of error of more or less than a thousand). She spotted Hendricks as he stumbled, his knees buckling. She raised the propeller blade overhead as another Mimic skittered up from the earth towards her. Die now, she thought. Kill yourself. Die now.

She took a hit to her head, her own blood dripping into her eyes, marring her vision, any sense of panic drowned out by a violent rush of relief (she was _dying_ ), and then: she woke in a field hospital. And she knew.

A young medic had beamed at her. The IV still pricked in the crook of her elbow. “Sergeant – we did it. We won.”

It was gone. It was all gone.

 

 

 

“How do I control it?” Cage had asked her.

“You have to die. Everyday,” she said.

Rita does not remember this. Cage does.

 

 

 

**three.**

 

The private dodges the mechanical Mimics perfectly, a practiced precision to the movement of his body, an elegance bred solely out of repetition. He doesn’t take his eyes off of her.

“William Cage,” he says as he comes nearer. “I’m you, at Verdun, Alphas, the blood, all that.” He pauses a couple of paces from her. She frowns and he takes a deep breath.

“Come with me – you’ll trust me by the time we grab Dr. Carter.”

He’s right: she does.

 

 

 

 

They celebrate Christmas in Moscow.

A large party is held at the Bolshoi Theater. Red banners are draped throughout, a map of the world as the main centerpiece, each country outlined in gold, a direct contrast to the map that had been shown on every news program – all that red, a different kind of red, designed to show the encroaching enemy. There’s a ballet program – _The Angel: The Story of Rita Vrataski_ – the dancers’ shoes black, the ribbons laced up their pale legs, and Rita watches them twirl and leap, feign anguish and terror until the final act of victory and deliverance. Rita’s face is tight for the entire show, her jaw aching from clenching it. Beside her, Cage jiggles his knee throughout, the only thing about him that belies any impatience or boredom.

“A beautiful show,” guests say to her after, as if she had anything to do with it. So she nods, smiles that lockjaw smile she likes to think she perfected somewhere between Berlin and Kiev, and Cage smiles and nods too, only on him it appears genuine.

It’s a black tie event but they’re both in uniform. The one blessing of this entire tour has been that uniform. For one thing, it’s meant less to pack. For another, seeing her in it – and perhaps the way she carries herself in it – gives others pause before they approach. Or at least in every other city it has. Either the Russians are that bold or they think sitting through a modern ballet loosely based on her life makes her that much more approachable. Cage is all too good at the schmoozing; she watches him glad-hand, attempt basic Russian phrases, join in the laughter when he gets it wrong. Rita’s terrible at all of this. The best she can do is smile (fake), offer warm holiday wishes (also fake), and thank them for both their generous hospitality and the lovely tribute of a show (definitely fake). A ranking party leader and his wife walk away and Rita’s mouth instantly falls into a resting frown. She cracks her jaw. Mid-crack, a member of the American delegation waves at the both of them. Her mouth freezes in what she hopes is a friendly grin but feels more like a maniacal grimace.

“Stop doing that,” Cage hisses at her.

“Doing what?” she hisses back.

He stretches his mouth into a bared-teeth grimace that makes the cords of his neck stand out.

“I don’t smile like that,” she says, cold and sotto voce.

“I’d hardly call it a smile at all,” he says before switching effortlessly back to PR-mode. “Sir, hello. Happy Holidays, good to see you.” He extends his hand, a politician shakes it, and Rita bows her head so no one can see her mouth, least of all Cage.

She listens to him though, the tone of his voice more than the words. She wonders when she’ll stop being surprised by him. There’s an open degree of kindness to him she never knows what to do with when directed at her. When offered to others, it’s easier to digest, to witness. Perhaps what she truly does not know what to do with is not his kindness but rather how much she likes him for it. How much less it makes him feel like a stranger and more like a friend.

They slip out of the party shortly after that, a mutually encouraged exit. He had told her when they arrived that morning that he had never been to Moscow. She had agreed, she hadn't either.

Hours later, here they are, playing tourist as they pass through the Resurrection Gate into Red Square. It’s been a cold winter yet there’s been little snow. Tonight the flakes drift down thick but gentle, wet when they meet her face. The cold air feels good in her lungs as she breathes in deep.

“Long night,” he says, his gaze directed up at the night sky.

“Long night,” she repeats. “You know, I think would’ve preferred they performed _The Nutcracker_ ,” she says.

He laughs, one single bark of sound. “Funny, I heard that’s what they considered renaming this show.”

She snorts, her head bowed, watching their feet kick away the newly fallen snow as they walk. She thinks of the dancers on the stage, of the way her name is said in each city they visit. How wrong they get the story each time.

“You’re lucky,” she tells him, looking over at him. “No one knows you.”

His face goes tight, closed-off. She’s misjudged, she thinks. He’s nothing like her. He wants to be known.

They return to the theater in silence. Snow collects in her hair, her cheeks flushed pink from the cold, both of them wearing leather gloves though her fingers have gone cold.

As they walk, she lets the back of his hand brush against her own. She does not pull away.

 

 

 

Rita begins to collect facts about Cage. It’s a mission all its own, something wildly competitive driving her: she will learn him as well as he knows her. The head start he has on her is impossible to ever outpace, let alone reach, but she is determined to try.

For one thing, she has no idea the parts of herself she has revealed to him.

For another you can never put into words what it feels like to know a person. It’s beyond having a catalog of applicable adjectives to describe them. It’s not just predicting their future actions, knowing their favorite things, their preferred methods of coping and living.

Like she said: he’s playing with a stacked deck.

She figures a collection of facts, a dossier of sorts, is a good enough start.

 

 

 

In Amsterdam she learns he can peel an apple in one single spiral against the blade of a knife. In Copenhagen she learns, disastrously, he is allergic to shellfish. In a hospital in Copenhagen she learns he has a soft-spot for the _Terminator_ franchise, even when dubbed in Danish.

What she finds – beyond the surface level observations, like how he prefers bourbon to rye or how he’s a mildly nervous flier despite the innumerable times they’ve likely flown together or how he only needs three hours of sleep to not only function but to engage in commonly accepted friendly human behavior – is that Cage is unremarkable, save for all the ways he is not. He is smart, conniving, and shockingly persuasive.

She finds that he looks at her with a fondness she does not think she has earned. Like he knows her, in a way far deeper than she has come to know him. He intimately knows what she is capable of, and how it’s the knowledge of all those things – not the Angel of Verdun mythos, not the Full Metal Bitch – that makes her matter to him. That makes her someone worth knowing.

He knows three phrases in Bulgarian; they're all profane. She learns this when they are detained at a checkpoint outside of Sofia.

 

 

 

The private crosses the firing range quickly.

“I have what you had,” he says to her, all in one rushed breath. “Bill Cage.” He offers his name like an afterthought, that harried look to him as he tries to rush her along not from Point A to Point B but from A to Z, his impatience belying how many times they have done this before.

How many times they have done this before. Jesus. If there’s a weakness in her to be found, this is it: she believes every word he says.

 

 

 

One: Cage is from New Jersey. His favorite Bruce Springsteen song is “Backstreets.” His favorite restaurant is a hole-in-the-wall Italian joint near where he grew up that he swears makes the best cavatelli he’s ever tasted. He tells her this in Rome – “I’ve had better” – and she snorts into her own bowl of pasta, slurping up strands of sauce-coated noodles as she laughs.

Two: he’s a double-talker. There’s not a single potential argument she hasn’t seen him try to worm his way out of. The verbal gymnastics he commands to extricate himself from a potential diplomatic foul-up are truly her favorite to witness at every dull reception they attend. At times she finds herself edging over the line into impropriety solely to watch him play clean-up.

Three: he can sleep anywhere and he can fall asleep immediately. On a plane, on a train, in the fifteen minutes spent outside the Portuguese ambassador’s office in Lisbon, en route to base in the midst of an ice storm in Reykjavik, in a pub in Dublin, in a cafe in Brussels, in a trattoria in Venice. Slumped against her during a particularly boring speech in Algiers and after a particularly filling meal in Istanbul. At least, she thinks, he doesn't snore.

Four: he hums to himself constantly. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Beethoven's Fifth. Taylor Swift. He seems to only ever do it when he’s perfectly content and he never actually seems aware that he is in fact humming. Mid-flight, in the specifically licensed UDF Victory Tour private plane, en route to Athens, she watches the sun rise out the window. Across the aisle she can hear Cage and what sounds like The Beatles. A bad attempt at The Beatles.

She clears her throat loudly. He doesn’t notice. “For the love of God, Cage. Silence? Is golden.”

He cuts off mid-chorus. “How’s that now?”

“The humming,” she says, like she can’t believe not only that she is still talking to this guy but that she’s spent the better part of two months and however many forgotten days with him. “Stop.”

He shrugs and smirks at the same time while she slouches into her seat.

“Did I ever even like you?” she asks him, eyes narrowed.

He grins. “You tolerated me.” He turns back to the newspaper open in his lap and begins to hum again.

 

 

 

The hotel room is dark, the lighting blue, spilling in through the windows. Pick a city. They’re all the same. They arrive. There is a speech. She waves. There is peace on earth.

Cage must detect something off about her behavior before she does – she wants to tell him that she’s tired, that some people, people who clearly are not him, do that sometimes: they get tired – because he has followed her up to her room. The room is completely untouched by her. There’s a garment bag in the opened closet and her duffel on the floor beside her bed. There’s a chocolate mint on the pillow. Cage points at it.

“You mind if ... ?”

She rolls her eyes. “Eat it. It’s yours.”

He unwraps the mint and pops it into his mouth.

“It’s funny,” he says, cracking the candy against his back molars. “We’ve done how many of these stops now?”

“I don’t know. Too many.”

He smiles but his mouth remains closed. “That number sounds about right.” He chews the hard candy, the sound the loudest thing in the room. “Sometimes I almost start believing what we tell them. It’s an easier line of thinking, I’ll give it that.”

“But it’s not true,” she says.

“No.” He shakes his head. “Sometimes I wonder if that matters though. The outcome’s the same. We’re here. They’re not. It’s like – ” he pauses. She gazes warily at him. “When I woke up, the last time, when it was over, it was like I had nothing to fear anymore. All of that, constantly resetting, constantly dying,” he pauses again. He looks up at her with the same zealotry he offers the crowds they greet. “I wasn’t afraid. You make every day count.”

Rita rolls her eyes again. “I’m not one of them,” she says. “There’s nothing to sell me.”

Cage doesn’t say anything to that. She turns to face the window. Snow’s falling gently. From this high up and this far away it’s hard to see the damage. It’s there. It’s in every city they have visited, each now comprised of what remains from the Mimics.

“It had the opposite effect on me,” she hears herself say. “Right after – I was afraid. I had never been more afraid. Every little thing that happened to me, I thought: this is it. This sticks. This matters. I can’t change this. You get spoiled by it, you know? A reset button. I never worried about death before that, not really. Everything was going to shit, the UDF included, and dying ... was just _there_. Always with a seat at the table.” Her voice drifts off and she can see her reflection in the darkened window, everything about her sharp: the cut of her chin, the jut of her shoulder, all muscle and bone. Cage is a smudge behind her, his head cocked at careful attention.

“And then I did die,” she says quietly. “And I came back. I died and I died and I died and I never stayed dead. It was a gift. There’s little to fear when something, the biggest _something_ , is no longer irrevocable.”

She pushes her hair off her face. “And then that gift was gone too and I was a bloodied broken mess in a hospital bed and I was terrified.”

She turns to look at him over her shoulder, his face fixed in a frown.

“It’s selfish. It’s so incredibly selfish of me. I’ve lived a hundred times – I’ve lived hundreds of times – and still, laying there, I thought to myself, I never want to die.”

“You were willing,” he says, his voice as quiet as her own. “With me, you were willing. You wouldn’t let me save you.”

She shrugs, can feel a smile threatening, can feel something else inside of her, too – a softening. “I never have had much use for chivalry.”

“Believe me – I know.”

“I’m sure I was scared,” she says, barely a whisper.

 “I know I was,” he says.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“I know,” he says again.

He approaches her, equal parts sure and cautious. He stands before her. The shadows of the room make his face all lines, harsh angles, but even that she finds familiar.

She presses her fingertips against him, right below his ribcage. Her fingers curl into a fist, the ridge of her knuckles pressing into him.

“You’re soft,” Rita tells him, her fist pressing harder against his stomach. The flesh gives, promising slight muscle beneath. She can feel it flutter beneath her touch. When he laughs, the sound is breathless.

This is what the present is, she thinks: the knife blade between then and the to-be, what happened and all you can’t control. She leans into him, her fist still caught between their bodies and when she kisses him it is like closing an open circuit: all the lights inside her switch on.

He is soft, and she allows her mouth to be soft against his mouth. She allows herself to be soft and she allows herself to want.

Cage doesn’t say anything, not at first, so he does know her. He knows better than to scare her off.

He doesn’t say anything, but he kisses her back. His mouth is tentative. There is an entire future ahead of them they will not be able to rewrite. This will be a thing that has happened between them.

“Is this ... ?” she asks, her mouth barely touching his. “The first?”

He shakes his head, the movement slight. “You kissed me. Before, back then.”

Rita’s mouth quirks up, causing her lips to brush against his, a spark between them that makes his fingers tighten against her waist.

“Cheeky tart,” she says, and when he opens his mouth to laugh, she swallows it and she kisses him, full and sure.

“Tell me everything,” she whispers against him later that night. “Tell me everything again.”

She wants to pretend she can remember.

 

 

 

(He watches her. She peels herself up off the ground, all sinew, one sibilant motion. Not for the first time does he think to himself – _remember me. Please. Remember me._

His desire for her to know him has nothing to do with making this mission any easier.

It’s for him. It’s selfish. He wants her to know him.

Cage stands up straighter. He approaches her. Rita stands and faces him.

“Yes?” she asks, as if they’ve never met.)

 

 

 

The tour ends in Paris. There’s a hole where the Louvre once was.

“Are people pissed about the art?” She had asked him that way back when he was a newfound stranger. Back when he first told her how the war truly ended. Impossibly, her first thought had been of the art housed at the museum. All that art, all that history – _poof_ , gone. “People are always getting pissed about art.”

“I think they’re all still busy being relieved. Pissed comes later.”

“Yeah,” she conceded.

“And no one really likes the Mona Lisa all that much anyway,” he added. “Size of a goddamned postage stamp.”

He was teasing, but she bit her bottom lip to keep from smiling all the same.

She still finds herself sometimes doing that with him: keeping herself in check. Like this is a hard-fought battle all its own not to allow any more of herself to him.

She’s learning though.

 

 

 

“I don’t know what happens next,” Rita tells him.

Neither of them are dressed in uniform. The tour is over but they’re still in Paris. As they walk, the wreckage of the Louvre shrinks in the distance. By the end of the month the rebuilding effort will be well under way. No one can agree on what it should be: a museum, a memorial, or something else altogether. Rita doesn’t care. She thinks anything other than a hole in the ground will be an improvement.

She glances over at Cage.

He smiles, that toothy, sincere, shit-eating, lit-from-inside smile of his. He shrugs and his smile remains delighted even as it skews rueful.

He stops walking and she turns to face him. He holds his hands open. “It’s a mystery,” he says.

And then he laughs.

 

 

 

**four.**

 

This is how they meet:

She presses her palms to the ground, feels the sweat collect on her collarbone. She listens only to the sound of her blood thumping in her ears, her pulse as it slows. She looks up, she rises, and he is there.

This is how they meet every time:

She is alone, and then, suddenly, he is there.

 

 

 


End file.
